Frankenstein and Romantic Visual Culture

In this lively and intriguing study, Ian Haywood places Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in dialogue with Romantic visual culture. In a series of compelling chapters, Haywood traces the visual history and cultural significance of the creature’s monstrous identity: the ‘modern’ Prometheus; necromantic spectacle; gigantism; the ‘freak’; the rebellious slave; the nightmare; the uncanny medical specimen.These visual contexts provide fresh perspectives on many of the novel’s core issues and illuminate some of the text’s most radical themes, including gender, sexuality, imperialism, revolution, and the subversion of Enlightenment aesthetic norms by the Gothic imagination. Frankenstein and Romantic Visual Culture breathes new life into this legendary text and reanimates the novel’s enduring fascination.